Winter Gothic, Infocult gloom for 2008

What horrors await us in this season of the long dark, and cheerful holiday?

We return to our earlier theme to recap, refine, and update Gothic delights in what is becoming an annual ritual.  Infocult readers and contributors offer the results of their shadowy investigations.  (And some were added via comments to this post; thank you, commentators)

• Conrad Aiken, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" (1933).  There's an excellent Night Gallery version (two YouTube parts: 1, 2).
• Ambrose Bierce, "Charles Ashmore's Trail" (1893) (one copy)
• Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo" (1910).
• John W. Campbell, "Who Goes There?" (1938).  Filmed twice, as The Thing from Another World (1951), then by John Carpenter as The Thing (1982).  Wikipedia's entry also claims Horror Express (1973) as a version.
• [Chaosium], The Ithaqua Cycle (2006).  Steve B recommends "The Wind Has Teeth," by Greg Vance and Scott Urban (originally in When the Black Lotus Blooms, 1990).
• Død snø ("Dead Snow", 2009). Nazi zombies in Norway. Official site. Cute line from trailer: "Ein! Zwei! Die!"
• August Derleth, "The Drifting Snow"
• The Goblin Man of Norway (1999).  Mockumentary for an Xbox game, Too Human (2008; development hell is Gothic enough). Semi-ARG.  On YouTube:
  
• Charles Grant, "Caesar, Now Be Still" (1978).
• Clemence Housman, "The Were-Wolf" (1896) (Gutenberg text, with illustrations)
• Stephen King, The Shining (1977).  The great 1980 film.
• Kuolleiden Talvi ("Winter of the Dead", 2007).  Zombies attack Finland in this student film. Part 1 on YouTube.
• The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden, 2006).
• Lights Out, "Northern Lights." (mp3) "[A]nother great audio drama from Wyllis Cooper", says HP.

  A sound, a humming, a crackling somewhere inside your head. And there are times when you'd swear it's a voice talking to you -- talking in some kind of strange language you can almost understand, filling your whole being with a kind of desperate, inescapable terror.

• H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1936).  Picks up on Poe (see below).
• H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, A Very Scary Solstice.  Prepare to carol! Behold the video version:
  
  (thanks to wifey for the timely gift)
• "Maybe Later We Can Make A Snowman." A very fine, twisted blog post about winter holiday horrors (blogged way back in '05).
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Case of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837) (one text).  Poe's only novel, climaxing in a doomed Antarctic expedition.  See also Lovecraft and Verne items on this list, for sequelae.
• Phil Pullman, Northern Lights (1995) (The Golden Compass, US title).  This superb children's novel is focused on the Arctic, including expeditions, a lab doing medical experiments on children (!), a great ice battle, and a mind-blowing final scene.  The book is filled with frights and dread, uncannily aiming at a legion of kids' fears.
• Thomas Pynchon, the Iceland Spar section of Against the Day (2006), 138-155 (see wiki here and here), an Arctic expedition and its horrible aftermath.
• Ravenous (1999), fun historical horror, well suited to the Christmas meal.
  
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818): the polar expedition framing story and the monster confronting Victor on the glacier.
• Dan Simmons, The Terror (2007).  A doomed polar expedition, with a Poe story reenactment.
• Jules Verne, Le Sphinx des Glaces ("Ice Sphinx", better known as "An Antarctic Mystery", 1897).  A sequel to Poe's Pym (see item on this list).  Gutenberg edition of one English translation.
• The Wendigo in folklore.
• The Wicker Man (1973). The great solstice movie of all time. There is no remake.
• X-files, "Ice" (1993).  Arctic fun with Mulder and Scully.

This list needs more stories.  And more women.

(many thanks to Steven B, HP, Steven Kaye, Wolf, and more chilly pals)

Comments

[Mark]

To supply a female writer, I would suggest Clemence Housman's "The Were-Wolf": http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13131/13131-h/13131-h.htm

(Clemence is poet/textual critic A.E. Housman's sister.)

[Mark]

I also like August Derleth's "The Drifting Snow" (vampires in the snow).

[catherwood]

You list "The Wicker Man (1973) The great solstice movie of all time. There is no remake." -- but of course there was a remake with Nicholas Cage, but hardly in the same league. And for our office gift swap game, I ended up with a collection of horror movies, including "Silent Night, Bloody Night", i was well pleased.

[HP]

catherwood, ixnay on the emakeray. Shtung! Shtung!

Are we including movies now? Because then I would've linked to Kuolleiden talvi, the 2007 Finnish student film about about a Romeroesque zombie holocaust in rural Finland. Remember, when the zombies come, they'll reach Finland last. (Update: The link is dead now. Crap. It's up on YouTube, in four parts, but the quality is poor and there's no subtitles. Part one is here. Plenty of torrents out there, too, which may be the way to go.)

Will Død snø be on next year's list? It's too soon to tell.

[HP]

By the way, Cooper's radioplay "Northern Lights" was written for Quiet, Please, not for Lights Out. My previous comment was incorrect. I very much regret the error. (There is, in fact, quite the drama regarding Cooper's departure from Lights Out due to "creative differences" with charismatic hack Arch Oboler, which is of interest only to Old Time Radio enthusiasts and showbiz drama queens.)

[Steven Kaye]

I don't know the title of it, but in junior high or high school we watched a movie in which the plot device involved ropes strung between buildings so people wouldn't get lost and freeze to death in the winter.

[Bryan Alexander]

@Mark, thank you for those tales. Added to the post.

@catherwood, congrats on your movie haul. But I refuse to acknowledge any Wicker Man sequel.

@HP, many thanks for those cinematic recommendations. Duly added.
(And we appreciate the Cooper/Oboler background, being worshippers of audio terror)

@Steven Kaye, how perfect a metaphor for either junior high or high school is such a scene.

[Steve B]

Two compilations for the season, one with me and one without, if I might:

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My friend Brian who runs Silber asked me to contribute to this year's instance of his biennial seasonal music compilation.

The 2008 installment of our Christmas compilation series features 26 tracks of norwegian folk, indie ambient, shoegaze, aggressive ambient, & electroacoustics. Strangely enough there seem to be somewhere around zero covers of traditional Christmas tunes this time out.

The entire album is available for free download on archive.org.

My piece "Sleighride" was created with Chapman Stick, E-Bows, capos, Moog MF-104 analog delay, Boss RC-20 & RC-20XL, Digitech Jamman, then processed through Sound Soap and Audacity.

########################
Also on archive.org for free download, the Darkmass 2008 compilation that I have nothing to do with other than personal enjoyment of -

Rules: only dark ambient and/or drone, composed especially for this comp, deadline: Dec.24. So you have to express your hate for Christmas in a subdued manner.

[HP]

I've read various accounts of Cooper's creation of and departure from Lights Out, but if you're familiar with both Cooper's and Oboler's writing style, it's fairly easy to fill in the blanks.

As I understand it (and I am notoriously unreliable), Wyllis Cooper originally created Lights Out as a 15-minute, live anthology program of scary stories, typified by Cooper's amazing sense of mood and dialog. None of these broadcasts survive.

When the show became a success, the show was expanded to a half-hour, transcribed program, Arch Oboler was brought on board, and Oboler soon smooth-talked his way into being chief writer, director, host, and producer. Cooper's contributions were marginalized in favor of more Oboler material. Oboler's approach favored audio special effects over storytelling, and emphasized Oboler's stilted dialog, stereotyped characters, pedantic leftism,* and increasingly over-the-top scenarios ("Chickenheart," for crying out loud).

Cooper left the show in disgust shortly thereafter, and only a few Cooper-scripted episodes for Lights Out survive (notably "Reunion after Death," which invites comparison to Peter Straub's Ghost Story).

Cooper apparently left radio for a time, and resurfaces after the war as a copywriter for WOR in New York, where he befriended announcer Ernest Chappell. One night, Chappell said that he always had ambitions to be an actor, and Cooper offered to write him some scripts. The result was Quiet, Please, which, in the manner of cult programming throughout history, aired only sporadically on a handful of Mutual Broadcasting stations as a transcribed program, generally late at night when few people heard it. A few episodes were traded by collectors from the beginning -- "The Thing of the Fourble Board," significantly -- but most episodes were presumed lost until Chappell passed away decades later, and a nearly complete stack of 16 RPM transcription acetates were found in his linen closet.

*Re. Oboler's politics: I'm an old Lefty myself, but jeez he could be ham-fisted about it.

[Bryan Alexander]

Good stuff, Steve B! Am listening to some now, while the rest download.

HP, that's terrific background. And I trust you completely.